Time moves fast, doesn’t it? So I’ve decided to get more disciplined about an exercise I’ve done periodically in the past. Each quarter, I make a list of all the significant media & streaming stories from the previous quarter that made it to the Wall Street Journal. Then I narrow down that long list of headlines to just five that illustrate key trends that are going to shape the evolving TV ecosystem. These aren’t necessarily the most important stories of the quarter, but rather the stories that provide a clue to the future of TV. I call it my “Top Five Tells” and you can read them below and in more detail in my latest #FutureOfTV.Live📺 report along with my latest proprietary survey – a fascinating one on the topic of captions usage in the era of TikTok.
5. Amazon, Innovation King. In TV. Again. And again.
Amazon’s signing of the Kelce Brothers podcast and its plans for a Shark Tank-style show are just tiny pieces of what I might term a “massively-built micro-media strategy”. The Kelce Brothers deal is reportedly worth more than $100M. As I point out with fresh survey data in my latest report, Podcasts are a huge part of what makes YouTube successful on CTV. (Get the report here.)
But more interesting was their September announcement of a Shark Tank-style show. As you’d guess, the winners are going to get top billing on Amazon.com. A natural win-win. And my TV history fluent readers know what a dominant show and format Shark Tank is. I’d expect this to be a huge winner but the success depends on great talent casting, which isn’t easy.
The Tell: Is there a company with bigger and longer tentacles around global media than Amazon? I don’t think so and I don’t expect them to slow their innovation investments anytime soon.
4. Training Data Unlocks a Revenue Revolution?
Also in September, studio Lionsgate struck a high-profile deal with Gen AI startup Runway.
In it, the companies trade projects: Runway gets to use Lionsgate’s library to train its models, and Lionsgate is going to get a custom-built and -tuned AI model to utilize internally. I look forward to learning more about both.
This type of deal promises to transform the economics of libraries going forward. Heretofore, content libraries have always been valued based on the property’s ability to be directly monetized via viewer eyeballs.
The Tell: Could it be that the highest and best economic use of these libraries in the future is simply to train AI models? Are we moving from infinite remixing of content into some heady “deep fake” like territory to explore new forms of content generation? More questions than answers here.
3. “Paramount Going to Zero” – a Prescient Wall Street Call
Last quarter’s #FutureOfTV.Live📺 Zoomcast saw my guest Needham analyst Laura Martin tell our audience that rich kid David Ellison’s Paramount was ‘going to zero.’ Wow, that was a stunner. Watch it here, around minute 7 of this highlight reel.
But alas the amazing Martin was validated by a massive write-down only a few weeks later on August 8th. A $6 billion charge from its cable TV business – and job cuts for 2,000 people.
The Tell: This write-down only emphasized the challenges related to broader pay TV declines faced by legacy media companies while we see a rapidly rising dominance by Big Tech.
2. Legal and Regulatory Environment Increasingly Uncertain
The legal and regulatory dramas seem to be non-stop these days. Gen AI related IP lawsuits, M&A related FTC lawsuits, and all the rest. Two quarters back I was stunned to see an NFL Ticket judgment get overturned. This quarter it was the successful Hail Mary executed by Fubo against Venu Sports which was the bombshell.
Exciting times indeed. Except that it feels like a basketball game with too many penalties being called. Let them play!
I’m a fan of Fubo, and they may well have the law on their side, but still, I can’t shake the feeling of anticipation I had about evaluating Venu’s new product. While the TV experience today is dramatically better than ever before, there are plenty of areas in which to innovate Sports TV viewing. Maybe Venu could’ve brought better automated highlights experiences to the table?
But it was not to be. A preliminary injunction against Fox, Disney and Warner Bros’ joint venture a few weeks before launch means the product may never see the light of day.
The Tell: This headline foreshadows continued legal and regulatory drama across a wide range of topics that are going to make it very difficult for established companies to put the genie back in the bottle across so multiple dimensions.
1. DirecTV Messes Up Again, Maybe For the Last Time
Hard to believe that DirecTV’s new owners thought it was good idea to have a standoff with Disney, owner of ESPN - the King of college football - at the start of the NCAA football season.
So many of us NCAA football fans are already reeling from the stupidity of “realignment”. Now you make it impossible for DirecTV users to see their Cal Bears in their new conference lose to Miami in the last few minutes? What a bummer.
DirecTV issued a statement that their subscriber losses would be material. My guesstimate from sleuthing various sources is that a cool million subscribers might have been lost over the debacle.
The Tell: If not for the recently announced merger between Dish and DirecTV this month I might have declared this headline as a tea leaf for the death of satellite TV but instead it may well have been a catalyst for the merger.
But here’s my question on that: Are two satellites better than one?
Brian Ring is President of Ring Digital LLC, a best-in-class GTM consultancy enabling high-tech video innovators to drive product-led revenue growth. Mr. Ring also publishes the #FutureOfTV.Live 📺 Quarterly, a TV Survey, Report & Zoomcast on the business, technology and creative markets fueling the growth of Streaming TV. Ring has 25 years of technical and product expertise in these areas.
Industry Voices are opinion columns written by outside contributors — often industry experts or analysts — who are invited to the conversation by StreamTV Insider staff. They do not necessarily represent the opinions of StreamTV Insider.